May Day is International Workers’ Day – 1ro de Mayo es el dia Internacional de los Trabajadores

More than a dozen calls have been issued for a general strike in the US on May 1, International Workers’ Day. Labor unions, immigrants rights organizations, various socialist and anarchist formations and the Movement for Black Lives have all issued calls. In LA, there are again multiple marches, with multiple calls being issued for a gathering at Olympic and Broadway. Other calls include a gathering beginning at MacArthur Park but converging with the other near City Hall, as well as local actions in Long Beach, the San Fernando Valley, Santa Ana and Riverside. Several unions are striking, and there are calls for a day without migrants. For example, SEIU United Service Workers West, representing more than 40,000 CA workers, said: “It’s time to rise as a people against fascism and autocratic leadership.”

A general strike, traditionally called by organized unions, is a demonstration of the power of the working class against not just individual employers, but capital — the private ownership and control of productive forces and land. Today, organized labor is a small fraction of the much larger body of working and oppressed people. Such a strike in the face of the reactionary Trump regime and the weak-willed neo-liberal Democrats demonstrates the powerful class consciousness that there is an “all of us” who understand that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”